by Bart Schultz
Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
it seems to be obvious that at each moment a man does what pleases him best, we
arrive by a kind of integration at the conclusion that that course will please him
best which gives him the greatest net result of pleasure. Between two such people
there is of course an inevitable contradiction. As Mr. Sidgwick cannot find any
mode of deciding which of these conceptions represents reason in the abstract, he
is in a hopeless dilemma. Such a dilemma awaits anybody who thinks that reason
can explain its own primary data, instead of reconciling the inferences from them.
Meanwhile I am content to say that neither case represents any actual human
being. Reason, on my view, necessarily produces different results when we start
with different motives, just as reason brings out different conclusions if we start
from different evidence. The fact that people ultimately agree in mathematical
conclusions proves that their primary intuitions are the same, or at least analogous.
The fact that they disagree in moral conclusions proves that their primary instincts
are different. The resulting discord proves only that the universe is in this sense an embodiment of unreason, that it is full of conflicting impulses. That is a fact which will be explained when we know the origin of evil. To me the difficulty seems to
be only a reflection upon the mirror of metaphysics of the indisputable truth that
mankind is engaged in a perpetual struggle for existence, with the consequent
crushing out – as we must try to hope – of the weakest and the worst.
Such reactions were not uncommon in the era of evolution, but for
Sidgwick they were merely suave evasions, a complete begging of the
question of, say, whether the weakest were actually the worst. His student
and colleague F. W. Maitland, in a review of the Memoir, rightly stressed
Sidgwick’s
watchful honesty which will not suffer any hope, however ardent, or any desire,
however noble, to give itself the airs of proof. ‘Well,’ wrote Sidgwick in , ‘I
myself have taken service with Reason, and I have no intention of deserting. At
the same time I do not think that loyalty to my standard requires me to feign a
satisfaction in the service which I do not really feel.’ These words give us the core of the matter.
It was not quite in Sidgwick to be cheerful about the irrationality of
humanity in ethical affairs, and he did not want to concede it without a
fight. Still, the changes between the different editions do suggest that he
was willing to give the work a “new aspect.” The infamous concluding
lines of the first edition had read:
[T]he fundamental opposition between the principle of Rational Egoism and
that on which such a system of duty [from the reconciliation of intuitional and
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utilitarian methods] is constructed, only comes out more sharp and clear after the
reconciliation between the other methods. The old immoral paradox, “that my
performance of Social Duty is good not for me but for others,” cannot be com-
pletely refuted by empirical arguments: nay, the more we study these arguments
the more we are forced to admit, that if we have these alone to rely on, there must
be some cases in which the paradox is true. And yet we cannot but admit with
Butler, that it is ultimately reasonable to seek one’s own happiness. Hence the
whole system of our beliefs as to the intrinsic reasonableness of conduct must fall,
without a hypothesis unverifiable by experience reconciling the Individual with
the Universal Reason, without a belief, in some form or other, that the moral order
which we see imperfectly realized in this actual world is yet actually perfect. If
we reject this belief, we may perhaps still find in the non-moral universe an ade-
quate object for the Speculative Reason, capable of being in some sense ultimately
understood. But the Cosmos of Duty is thus really reduced to a Chaos: and the
prolonged effort of the human intellect to frame a perfect ideal of rational conduct
is seen to have been foredoomed to inevitable failure. (ME )
Sidgwick will allow nothing to diminish the drama of this tragedy.
The supposition that there is a moral order to the universe reconciling
egoism and utilitarianism is nothing less than “an hypothesis logically
necessary to avoid a fundamental contradiction in a vast system of Beliefs:
a contradiction so fundamental that if it cannot be overcome the whole
system must fall to the ground and scepticism be triumphant over one
chief department of our thought.” Although Butler may have been the
last name evoked by Sidgwick in this context, another precedes him by
only a short space, one more profoundly expressive of Sidgwick’s angst:
Still it seems plain that in proportion as man has lived in the exercise of the
Practical Reason – as he believed – and feels as an actual force the desire to do
what is right and reasonable as such, his demand for this premiss will be intense and imperious. Thus we are not surprised to find Socrates – the type for all ages of the
man in whom this desire is predominant – declaring with simple conviction that
‘if the Rulers of the Universe do not prefer the just man to the unjust, it is better to die than to live.’ And we must observe that in the feeling that prompts to such
declaration the desire to rationalize one’s own conduct is not the sole, nor perhaps
always the most prominent, element. For however difficult it may practically be to
do one’s duty when it comes into conflict with one’s happiness, it often does not
seem very difficult, when we are considering the question in the abstract, to decide
in favour of duty. When a man passionately refuses to believe that the “Wages of
Virtue” can “be dust,” it is often less from any private reckoning about his own
wages than from a disinterested aversion to a universe so fundamentally irrational
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that “Good for the Individual” is not ultimately identified with “Universal Good.”
(ME –)
This formulation, stressing the “disinterested aversion” to a perverse
universe pitting duty against interest, is of the first importance, suggesting
the complexity of Sidgwick’s dualism. There is more to his worry than
that what is good from one’s own point of view may not square with
what is good universally. As important as one’s concern for one’s own
good may be, in driving home this conflict, one may also think it tragic
or preposterous that others are called by duty to self-sacrifice. Hence,
the infamous pessimism of the first edition of the Methods. There is no
Nietzschean glee in Sidgwick’s estimate of the significance
of the death
of God (ME ). He would later write to Alexander Bain that he had
written his conclusion “at the very last minute, in a fit of candour.”
In later editions he would, as he put it in the Preface to the third,
expand his treatment on certain points for the sake of completeness and
for the book’s “better adaptation to the present state of ethical thought
in England.” This apparently required a marked softening of his case,
and a playing up of the constructive possibilities afforded by a rethinking
of epistemology, rather than of religion. With the second edition, the
conclusion becomes:
If we find that in other departments of our supposed knowledge propositions are
commonly taken to be true, which yet seem to rest on no other grounds than
that we have a strong disposition to accept them, and that they are indispensable
to the systematic coherence of our beliefs; it will be difficult to reject a similarly supported assumption in ethics, without opening the door to universal scepticism.
If on the other hand it appears that the edifice of physical science is really con-
structed of conclusions logically inferred from premises intuitively known; it will
be reasonable to demand that our practical judgments should either be based on
an equally firm foundation or should abandon all claim to philosophic certainty.
(ME )
Something very like this wording endured through all later editions, ulti-
mately becoming, in the last:
If then the reconciliation of duty and self-interest is to be regarded as a hypothesis logically necessary to avoid a fundamental contradiction in one chief department
of our thought, it remains to ask how far this necessity constitutes a sufficient
reason for accepting this hypothesis. This, however, is a profoundly difficult and
controverted question, the discussion of which belongs rather to a treatise on
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General Philosophy than to a work on the Methods of Ethics: as it could not
be satisfactorily answered, without a general examination of the criteria of true
and false beliefs. Those who hold that the edifice of physical science is really
constructed of conclusions logically inferred from self-evident premises, may
reasonably demand that any practical judgments claiming philosophic certainty
should be based on an equally firm foundation. If on the other hand we find that
in our supposed knowledge of the world of nature propositions are commonly
taken to be universally true, which yet seem to rest on no other grounds than
that we have a strong disposition to accept them, and that they are indispensable
to the systematic coherence of our beliefs, – it will be more difficult to reject a
similarly supported assumption in ethics, without opening the door to universal
scepticism. (ME )
No doubt Sidgwick thought that if “failure” were not to be the last
word, then “scepticism,” rather than “certainty,” would be appropriate.
Some have suggested that the changes to the conclusion of the
Methods illustrate the changes in Sidgwick’s epistemological stance.
Thus, Seth Pringle-Pattison, reviewing the memoirs of both Sidgwick
and Green, argued that there was “a change in Sidgwick’s attitude in
the later years of his life” on the “question of the nature of proof.”
That is, the younger Sidgwick had held to the “old ideal” of “conclu-
sions logically inferred from self-evident principles,” whereas the older
Sidgwick, “unconsciously influenced perhaps by the central Kantian idea
of ‘transcendental deduction’ . . . and by the debates which arose round
Mr. Balfour’s Foundations of Belief,” refers “to the analogy of physical
science and suggests (without absolutely committing himself to) the new
criterion of the truth of any proposition” – namely, the “systematic coher-
ence of our beliefs.”
But this overstates the case. As argued in the previous section,
Sidgwick’s epistemology was complex and multicriterial from the start. It
is true that in the first edition, he is more concerned to argue, for example:
I find that I undoubtedly seem to perceive, as clearly and certainly as I see any
axiom in Arithmetic or Geometry, that it is ‘right’ and ‘reasonable,’ and the ‘dictate of reason’ and ‘my duty’ to treat every man as I should think that I myself ought
to be treated in precisely similar circumstances, and to do what I believe to be
ultimately conducive to universal Good or Happiness. But I cannot find insepa-
rably connected with this conviction, and similarly attainable by mere reflective
intuition, any cognition that there actually is a Supreme Being who will adequately
reward me for obeying this rule of duty, or punish me for violating it.
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Put more generally, “I do not find in my moral consciousness any intu-
ition, claiming to be clear and certain, that the performance of duty will
be adequately rewarded and its violation punished” (ME ). And in
thus discussing whether it may be necessary to “borrow a fundamental
and indispensable premiss from Theology” – either theistic or Buddhist,
he allows – there is no parallel highlighting of the coherentist alterna-
tive. However, by the second edition, the wording of the final paragraph
includes the lines,
We have rather to regard it as an hypothesis logically necessary to avoid a fun-
damental contradiction in one chief department of our thought. Whether this
necessity constitutes a sufficient reason for accepting the hypothesis, is a question which I cannot here attempt adequately to discuss; as it could not be satisfactorily
answered, without a general examination of the criteria of truth and error.
And part of this had appeared, in more subordinated form, earlier on in
the first edition.
Thus, Sidgwick clearly allows the possibility that something is wrong
with a too-austere philosophical intuitionism if it leads to this result, so
that more weight should be put on the coherence criterion and so on.
And even in the first edition, as we have seen, he sets out the Cartesian
criterion in connection with the others, allowing simply that it may “be
of real use; if applied with the rigour which Descartes certainly intended,
and not with the laxity which impairs the value of the important work of
Reid” (ME ). Furthermore, as he would explain in retrospect,
When I was writing my book on Ethics, I was inclined to hold with Kant that we
must postulate the continued existence of the soul, in order to effect that harmony of Duty with Happiness which seemed to me indispensable to rational moral life.
At any rate I thought I migh
t provisionally postulate it, while setting out on the serious search for empirical evidence. (M )
That is, while setting out on his parapsychological investigations.
This retrospective account may seem slightly puzzling, given Sidgwick’s
emphatic statement in the first edition that he could not possibly
fall back on the Kantian resource of thinking myself under a moral necessity to
regard all my duties as if they were commandments of God, although not entitled to hold speculatively that any such Supreme Being exists “as Real.” I am so far
from feeling bound to believe for purposes of practice what I see no ground for
holding as a speculative truth, that I cannot even conceive the state of mind which
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these words seem to describe, except as a momentary half-wilful irrationality,
committed in a violent access of philosophic despair. (ME )
But as Sidgwick admitted, provisionally making such a postulation, on
the grounds that the evidence is not all in, is a different matter. Hence
the importance of recognizing that his work was an ongoing inquiry,
extending to areas outside of ethical theory, even if the process was not
the simple evolution described by Pringle-Pattison. As with theology, the
emphasis was on the search that might achieve unity through Apostolic
inquiry.
C. D. Broad famously objected that this effort to escape the dualism of
practical reason was incoherent, since it did not meet the problem at the
level of fundamental intuition but merely sought a contingent practical
way of avoiding conflict. Whether or not God might exist, the principle
of Rational Egoism and the principle of Rational Benevolence are still
in flat opposition to one another. But Broad was misguided in this,
as William Frankena and many others have demonstrated. As C. A. J.
Coady has neatly put it, Sidgwick seems to be envisioning a God that
has so effectively harmonized the world of practical reason that both the
principles are “true, and possibly self-evident, and it is the appearance of
a contradiction between them that is wrong.” This seems exactly right,